You’re getting to the end of the meeting with a prospect, and you ask that question, “What kind of budget are we looking at?”
Your prospect sits back, brow furrowed slightly.
“I have no clue, I’ve never bought one of these before. What does it usually cost?”
If your pricing structure is set up well, you probably have a few different options that could meet the needs of your prospect to varying degrees. And if you believe in what you’re doing, you want to help the prospect regardless of what they can invest.
Realistically, almost every prospect has some number they’re hoping to hear. Or at least they have some limit in the back of their mind, even if they haven’t consciously thought of it yet.
So let’s say you’ve asked your prospect that question, and they responded like the prospect we just talked about. Let’s also assume you have three different options. For the sake of this example, let’s say your three options start at $2,000, $4,000 and $8,000.
A situation like that is the perfect time to use the bucket method.
The bucket method involves giving your prospect several different price ranges to choose from. You might even include one or two options on the low or high end that would help you disqualify them as a prospect.
“Great question. We’ve actually got a few different options. Were you thinking a couple hundred, a couple thousand, five thousand or ten thousand?”
Chances are extremely good that at that point, they’ll grab on to one of those buckets. And even if it’s the smallest one where we don’t actually have an option, we can use that to let the prospect know we may not be a good fit.
